Lecture 28: The Warnings of Hebrews, the Wisdom of James, and the Suffering Churches of First Peter

The lecture, section by section

1. The Hebrews shelf

   William Lane's Word Biblical Commentary is encyclopedic in gathering the exegetical discussion, traditional and critical; F. F. Bruce's NICNT remains the best English interpretation for the shelf; and George Guthrie's NIVAC volume, built on his published dissertation on the structure of Hebrews, is one of the highlights of its series, keeping interpretation, bridge, and application admirably distinct. Dr. MacArthur shows how it preaches, with Westcott the enduring classic and Homer Kent a useful voice for the interpretive debates.

2. Four proposals for the structure

   Read as a quasi-Pauline letter, Hebrews yields doctrine followed by exhortation, Kent's approach; some critics despair of any structure; most conservative exegetes see thematic linkage, one theme handing off to the next, Son above angels, greater than Moses, the great high priest, the better covenant and sacrifice, the response of faith, which MacArthur gathers under the single banner of the supremacy of Christ. Guthrie's dissertation refined the picture Essex adopts: Hebrews is a sermon that weaves exposition and exhortation throughout, the preacher explaining the Old Testament's witness to Christ and applying it as he goes, never saving the application for the last five minutes. Guthrie's further claim of a grand chiasm hinged at 6:4 to 8 convinces Essex less; the essential insight is the weave.

3. The warning passages: the question

   Five warning passages punctuate the sermon, and the commentators rightly read them consistently: whatever Hebrews 6 means, the warnings of chapters 2, 3, 10, and 12 mean. Chapter 6 arrives on a rebuke: the preacher has meat to serve on Melchizedek, but the hearers have become dull of hearing, milk-drinkers when they ought to be teachers; so, leaving the elementary teaching, let us press on to maturity. Then the warning: it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put him to open shame.

4. The positions on Hebrews 6

   The Arminian reading, Lenski's, takes it straight: Christians who fall away lose their salvation, and, the clause usually softened, cannot regain it. Kent reads a hypothetical: the description is real Christian experience, but verse 9's confidence shows no hearer has done it. Hodges and the Bible Knowledge Commentary read a true Christian's loss of reward, exclusion from the millennium and from further blessing in the eternal state, a construction Essex cannot locate on the map of Revelation, which knows no parked, unrewarded believers during the kingdom. Lane speaks of Christians who apostatize yet remain Christians under eschatological judgment, a position hard to classify. MacArthur reads three audiences in Hebrews and assigns the warning to near-Christians, intellectually convinced but never converted. And the reading Essex takes, the traditional Calvinistic one: the language is phenomenological.

5. Why the phenomenological reading

   The descriptions are meant at face value as descriptions of what was outwardly seen: enlightened is salvation language in chapter 10; partaker is what Christ truly became of flesh and blood in chapter 2; tasted means actually took, not sampled. For a time everything about these people looked like conversion. But the parallel warning of chapter 10 sets the stakes: for the one who goes on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth there remains no sacrifice, only a terrifying expectation of judgment, vengeance, the Lord judging his people, a fearful falling into the hands of the living God, eternal judgment, not discipline. So the falling away does not forfeit a possessed salvation; it exposes a profession that was never possession, exactly as the phenomenological principle read Galatians. The preacher believes better things of his hearers, things that accompany salvation, yet warns because in any congregation contemplating a retreat from Christ there may be one or two whose question must become: am I in the faith at all?

6. Impossible, and the pastoral reality

   Is impossible absolute? Some soften it to exceedingly hard; Bruce notes in passing that those who once professed and even taught the truth prove the hardest of all to reach again; Bauckham's caution, that what is impossible with men is possible with God, is theology rather than exegesis, but keeps the door from being humanly slammed. Essex's larger charge to the class: the Calvinistic tradition rarely speaks of apostasy, yet the later New Testament insists on its reality, and every ministry will meet it. The warnings are real warnings, used by the Spirit to keep the true; and the preached application travels well beyond first-century Judaism: whenever something looks safer or easier than Christ, Hebrews answers that the true believer endures, and endurance now becomes the dominating theme from James to Third John.

7. James: the author and his platform

   James the apostle died under Herod in Acts 12, about AD 44; the James of this letter is the Lord's brother, who from that year emerges as the leading voice of the Jerusalem church: spokesman at the council of Acts 15, counselor of Paul in Acts 21. His platform explains his letter. The Sanhedrin's religious authority was recognized by diaspora Jews everywhere, which is why its letters empowered Saul in far Damascus; correspondingly, dispersed Jewish believers, scattered from Jerusalem by the early persecutions back to the lands of Acts 2, looked to the mother church for direction, and the mother church's voice was James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes who are dispersed abroad.

8. The readers and the date

   The recipients are Jewish Christians, holders of the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, worshiping in the setting of the diaspora synagogue, for if a man with a gold ring comes into your synagogue, says 2:2, apparently believing assemblies still meeting under the synagogue's roof. The letter deals only with relations to unbelieving Jews, never with the Jew-Gentile questions that consumed the church after the Jerusalem Council, which argues an early date, about AD 45 to 50, making James very possibly the first New Testament book written. Its form reverses Hebrews: an epistolary opening with no epistolary close, and, like Galatians, one occasional letter to many assemblies facing one situation.

9. The character of James

   The occasion surfaces immediately: believers under trial were recasting their trials as temptations and lodging the accusation against God, let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God. James answers at both ends of the letter: trials are allowed by God to produce endurance, and blessed are those who endured, you have heard of the endurance of Job. The letter presses toward maturity, the mature man being the wise man whose faith does, not merely hears; it carries more imperatives per word than any New Testament letter, upward of fifty in five chapters; it echoes the Sermon on the Mount throughout, the royal law from the King himself; and its genre is Old Testament wisdom discourse, pithy statements in the manner of early Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, with connections made Hebraically, by setting one thing beside another, rather than with Greek therefores, the approach Davids's commentary works out. The purpose: believers accusing God under trial were told to receive the word, quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, and so to develop the endurance that delivers the soul and receives the crown of life.

10. First Peter: the readers no one can explain

    First Peter goes to those who reside as aliens, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, the provinces along the Black Sea in northern Asia Minor, churches whose founding no chapter of Acts records and whose connection to Peter history does not explain; yet Peter, writing about the early sixties, exercises oversight as an apostle, a witness of Christ's sufferings, and, to the elders, a fellow elder, with the transfiguration testimony of Second Peter 1 behind him.

11. One audience, three letters

    Second Peter names no province, but 3:1 says, this is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you: most naturally our First Peter, so the same suffering churches. And Jude 17 tells its readers to remember the words spoken beforehand by the apostles, that in the last time there will be mockers following their own ungodly lusts, all but quoting Second Peter 3:3, so Jude too addresses the audience of Peter's letters. The canonical chain follows: First Peter strengthens sufferers; Second Peter, Peter's dying counsel, warns that false teachers will come, for they prey on churches unsettled by suffering; Jude announces that they have come, and tells the churches what to do.

12. First Peter: themes

    The letter is profoundly God-centered, God named thirty-nine times in five chapters. The suffering is chiefly verbal: reviling, insult, being maligned, moving toward the fiery ordeal of 4:12 that should not surprise them. Against it stands the letter's first imperative: gird your minds for action, keep sober, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought at the revelation of Jesus Christ. The readers are converted Gentiles, for the time already past is sufficient for carrying out the desire of the Gentiles, whose old companions are surprised they no longer run with them and malign them for it; hence the letter's insistent call to excellent conduct, submission in state, household, and church, and holiness, be holy yourselves in all your behavior, as the chosen of God.

13. Purpose, shelf, and the pulpit

    The purpose: persecuted Christians were called to live a holy life as they remembered their future hope. The shelf: Thomas Schreiner's new NAC volume is among the premier New Testament commentaries in its series, and doubly valuable since it carries Second Peter and Jude, where good exegesis is scarce; with Michaels, Hiebert, Clowney's Bible Speaks Today, a Reformed preacher's model of relating the suffering text to present believers, and MacArthur. And the pulpit note: no congregation must be bleeding to need First Peter, for the letter's suffering is mostly the verbal kind, the mockery and maligning that every believing congregation knows, and its word of hope and holiness preaches in every generation.

1. The warnings of Hebrews are real, and yet the preacher is convinced of better things concerning his hearers. How can a church take warnings seriously without losing assurance, and what does pressing on to maturity look like in practice?

2. James's readers turned their trials into accusations against God. When suffering comes, what habits of hearing, speech, and anger does James prescribe, and why do they produce endurance rather than bitterness?

3. First Peter's suffering is mostly verbal: mockery from former companions surprised at a changed life. Where do believers today feel that pressure, and how does fixing hope completely on coming grace change the way they answer it?